I've made the comment before that the American airline industry may be the very worst business around. Participants will price-cut their way into oblivion, extort employees with the threat of bankruptcy, and set up a system that treats customers more like cattle than people. No great wonder, then, that so many have gone belly-up.

That's not quite the case outside the U.S., though. As British Airways (NYSE: BAB) demonstrated again on Friday, it actually is possible to run a profitable full-service airline. Of course, with about two-thirds of BA's pre-tax earnings coming from lucrative routes to the U.S., it's not really a fair apples-to-apples comparison with its domestic U.S. brethren.....

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